scholar,
When will you stop playing at knowledge and prove that you have a workable kings list that does not directly contradict the WT scholars? 587/86 is a difference of some few months, in dispute for exactly the reasons Farkel gave (although most scholars don't word the dispute that way ). It isn't the difference of even a whole year, yet you seem to be completely at ease with a missing 20 years (or by your best calculation offered to date, a missing 27 years—allowing for some mysterious 7 year period you get only from Ptolemy's Canon and surmisation about the effects of what is recorded at Daniel 4).
You ignore Adda-Guppi (Nabonidus' mother) entirely, you ignore the contemporary Egibi banking documents that span the entire period, you ignore the significance of the Hillah Stele (Nabon. No. 8) and the year 555 BC (Nabonidus' first year, according to both secular scholars and WT scholars), from which absolute date, the absolute date 539 BC is derived.
If you simply agree that Nabonidus' first year was 555 BC, you then have to explain which king or kings made his mother live to be either 124 or 126 years of age.
If you agree with the WT scholars kings list, you have to explain why 20 years of banking business went unrecorded or unstored, and why there are documents spanning the reigns of every king in the Babylonian line—without interruption.
You have not responded to the fact that Jeremiah (while wearing the yoke for Judah) asked (for Jehovah) why "this city" (Jerusalem) should become a devastated place.
Your scholarship is not even amateurish, much less remarkable. I know that and I haven't even read the Johnsson hypothesis you keep winding on about. I would much rather go with a chronology that has difficulty pinning down a period of a few months (that spanned the turn of a year) rather than a chronology that has—at very best, being given every benefit of credulity—a problem pinning down 20 years. Actually, though, your hypothesis regarding the 7 years of Nebuchadnezzar's debasement as being the start of another rulers's reign would not help your argument...it would mean you lost 27 years somewhere. Of course, you only brought it up to call into question secular chronology, without a second thought to the complications it would present to your chronology.
So, please stop pussyfooting around the issue at hand. We are talking chronology. Stop yakking about the problems with secular chronology versus Bible chronology and present yours. For Babylon, not for Jerusalem. Take for granted that we have read the Bible and know for certain that it doesn't contain the dates 555 BC, 607 BC, 539 BC, or 537 BC. Starting from there, prove your point. Give us the course of events (and dates) for Babylon—forgetting that Jerusalem existed, for the moment.
AuldSoul